Dr. Dobb’s SDWest is a large, well known developers’ conference taking place this week in Santa Clara, CA. Although this is not an 'Agile' conference, numerous presentations and the first two keynotes have been from the Agile world. The SDWest Show Daily , an online news source for the conference, has reported on topics of interest to Agile practitioners, from TDD to SOA.
Today, Jutta Eckstein, author of Agile Software Development in the Large, led a workshop where the attendees discussed different challenges in global Agile development problems and solutions. The three main points of discussion were culture, communication, and adoption. Two of the recommendations that came out of the talks were to 1) have a 'sabbatical' program where team members travel and transfer knowledge face-to-face, and 2) use tests as requirements for non-ambiguous communication.
Alistair Cockburn gave an engaging overview of the Crystal methodologies, which are perhaps the most flexible of the all of the agile methodologies available. Cockburn stated that the three main properties of Crystal Clear are 1) frequent delivery, 2) osmotic communication, and 3) reflective improvement. All of Cockburn's articles and talks are available for download on his site and are well worth reading.
For those unable to attend SDWest, a visit to SDWest Show Daily will be useful as it provides summaries of important topics and recordings of the keynote presentations.